The Abandoned E-Tailer Shopping Cart: Factors and Business Strategies to Reverse the Barriers

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic and due to the lockdown of physical stores, consumers' online buying activity increased substantially, and now in the post-COVID era, it is going to continue. One problem of great concern to e-tailers has long been the high rate of shopping cart abandonment. About two-thirds of all online shopping carts get abandoned, costing e-tailers huge lost sales. Over last two decades, consumer researchers have investigated the consumer psychology behind this consumer act. This body of literature is fragmented and a comprehensive list of factors that drive cart abandonment does not exist. Drawing upon the available literature, we build such a list, aligning it alongside the customer journey.Because a list of the causes of cart abandonment does not exist, a comprehensive management guide for action to curb the abandonment does not exist either. In the trade press, blogs and promotional ideas do exist, but they are fragmented and are not grounded in any conceptual framework. We propose that trust is a fundamental force at every stage of the customer journey, a force or factor that propels the customer in their forward journey, and its absence causes the customer to abandon their online shopping carts. We propose that trust is warranted at three different loci (or facets) in the customer journey, and we map separate "trust builders" for each locus or facet.We next depict both the causes of abandonment and its rescuers (i.e., actions to save the cart) in a wheel model comprising five sectors. This wheel model serves both as a conceptual grounding and as a visually helpful managerial guide for strategic action. These actions are next mapped against the characteristics of strategic management. It is shown how actions to control cart abandonment interface with strategic management. We offer this wheel model for empirical test by future academic researchers. Just as important, this model can also serve e-tailers in their adoption and implementation, by some of them in A/B test protocols as prelude to large scale adoptions.

The Intention to Cart Abandonment in the Context of Multi-Channel Pricing

“…The vast majority of research articles on purchase abandonment concerns the online or mobile environment (Song, 2019;Jiang et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2021;Kapoor & Vij, 2021), various researchers had stated that e-cart abandonment is determined by several factors (de Silva & Wijayanayake, 2015). Online shopping behaviour has been investigated by marketing scholars for more than two decades now (Mittal, 2021). The presented research model refers to the customer intention to resign from purchasing both in a physical store and via a mobile app caused by a multi-channel pricing strategy.…”